Q&A With John Moe

John Moe is, by all accounts, a normal guy. The Minnesota public radio host and author is a husband, father and trusted name in technology reporting.

On Twitter, though, he’s a crucial voice for bizarre meta-comedy, relentlessly making hilarious non-jokes about Tony Hawk’s skateboard-centric plans for fixing the economy, literal and figurative boat explosions and parodied lyrics to the “Ghostbusters” theme song.

The “Ghostbusters” spoofs have grown into their own phenomenon, known affectionately by the ubiquitous hashtag: #Ghostcatchers.

“It’s just this thing,” he half-explained in a tweet last month, and that’s about as clear as he can make it.

Moe chatted with WEEKEND about #Ghostcatchers, Twitter as a medium for comedy and how the forward march of technology has made Bulgarian trip-hop as accessible as Duran Duran.

WEEKEND: For a technology journalist and radio host, you interact with an awful lot of comedians on Twitter. How did you become a part of that circle?
John Moe: I’ve been a humor writer for a long time, going back to my work with McSweeney’s, and I’ve made a lot of friends with funny people over the years.

WKND: Do you believe Twitter is now a legitimate medium for comedy?
JM: Well, anything’s a legitimate medium. Road signs can be a medium for comedy. I don’t believe there’s some sort of test to determine if comedy is legitimate. The thing about Twitter is it has a lot of people doing interesting things, and that’s because of the low bar of entry. And any art form with limitations put on it thrives as people find their niches and do their own thing. Performance art, for example, is so boundless that it’s hard for people to narrow it down, whereas something like driftwood animal collection is such a small niche. What I’m really saying is driftwood animal collection is superior to performance art.

WKND: How did you come up with #Ghostcatchers?
JM: When did “Ghostbusters” come out? 1984? I came up with it in 1984. I saw the movie and that song by Ray Parker, Jr. is so ridiculous that we immediately started doing these parodies about it. And it’s not just the lyrics. It’s the exclamation points, the boundless enthusiasm of the whole thing. There’s always something funny about being enthusiastically wrong.

WKND: If you’d been doing this since 1984, how did you decide to bring it to Twitter?
JM: It was one of those things that I thought was too stupid even for the unbelievably low bar of Twitter. I’m really honestly not trying to impress people. I just write down things I think are funny. But I didn’t think I could even put “Ghostcatchers” on there. It was just so stupid. But then one night I got on there and fired off five or six of them in a row, and Paul F. Tompkins started re-posting a lot of the things I was writing, and it brought me hundreds of new followers. And it just became this thing. Paul’s unswerving allegiance to it was another layer of comedy, too. He would just retweet every single one I posted. Now there’s an account called @stayingpuffing that’s dedicated to it, and I started making the shirts, and those are selling. For whatever reason, it’s really caught people’s imagination. On the other hand, I’ve been getting a lot of unfollow emails, too. (Laughs)

WKND: Do you think the speed of the technology you’re using to disseminate it is why it’s taken off?
JM: Oh, definitely. When I was growing up, there were a handful of bands out there. There was Quiet Riot, Iron Maiden, Duran Duran, and they’d have an album every year or every couple of years, and these kinds of bands were the only ones who could do it and distribute it because it was so expensive. But now if you want to hear Bulgarian trip-hop, you can just get online and get it in abundance. There’s no superbands anymore. So communication and social media have totally changed the way this stuff is consumed.

WKND: What’s your favorite #Ghostcatchers tweet?
JM: The one that I think seemed to catch on the most, it was about a week after I started this and I told Paul (F. Tompkins) that I didn’t know how many more places I could take this. There’s only so many lyrics in that song! And he told me I just have to blast through, so I came up with “If there’s something strange! In your neighborhood! Your neighborhood is strange! DON’T LIVE THERE!”